


This Means War!

by FlirtyFroggy



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern: No Powers, Dry Humping, Enemies to Lovers, Idiots, M/M, Mutual Masturbation, a totally healthy foundation for a relationship, enemies to lovers speedrun, just absolute idiots, rating is for sex but also for rank stupidity, teenagers should not be exposed to this nonsense behaviour at such an impressionable age, warring neighbours
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-27
Updated: 2021-01-27
Packaged: 2021-03-13 11:08:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29027712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FlirtyFroggy/pseuds/FlirtyFroggy
Summary: “Would it be bad to set something on fire?” Nicky mused. Nile lowered the sandwich she was about to bite into with a long-suffering sigh.“Depends what it is. If it’s a pile of logs in a fireplace, then no. If it’s your neighbour’s flat, then yes.”For the prompt: Shenanigans between neighbors who cannot stand each other and are each trying very hard to get the other to move out.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 29
Kudos: 243





	This Means War!

**Author's Note:**

> I saw [a list](https://flirty-froggy.tumblr.com/post/641465181109649408/aesterea-ideas-for-interesting-platonic) of prompts for 'interesting platonic dynamics', and my brain said 'Platonic? Don't know her,' and wrote this. It ended up being less 'trying to make each other move out' and more just 'trying to annoy the crap out of each other', but they're still behaving terribly.

Joe knew he was being a dick about it. He didn’t really care. If Mr Downstairs wanted to get along with his neighbours then he shouldn’t have taken up the fucking violin, should he? He hefted the drill in his hand. He’d been meaning to put up this shelf for ages. Did he really need to do it at 6am on a Saturday? Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today, people said. Did he really need the additional eight shelves he had purchased the day before? There was no such thing as too much storage space, according to all those home decorating shows his sister liked.

The clock caught his eye again and he hesitated. Then he remembered the violin.

The drill whirred to life.

* * *

Nicky jerked awake, his heart trying to escape out of his chest while his brain scrambled to catch up with the rest of his body. Break-in? Earthquake? Alien invasion?

No. It was Him Upstairs. Drilling. He was drilling at— he fumbled for his phone and dropped it when he saw the time.

“Son of a...” Nicky muttered as he stalked upstairs. “Selfish, inconsiderate…” First the stamping around at all hours and now this. He hadn’t said anything about the stamping, irritating as it had been. The building was a house that had been split into two flats and hadn’t been designed for two separate households, and no doubt the landlord was violating a bunch of sound-reduction regulations besides. Noise was to be expected, even if it was at weird hours.

This? This was unacceptable.

He knocked on the door of the upstairs flat. The drilling continued. He hammered on the door with the side of his fist. The drilling stopped.

Nicky waited.

The door didn’t open, but the drilling didn’t resume either. After a couple of minutes loitering on the landing, he went back downstairs.

There was no way he was getting back to sleep now. He made breakfast as loudly as he could.

* * *

Joe didn’t deserve this. He really didn’t. Sure, the 6am drilling might have been… a bit much. But he’d stopped that almost immediately and finished putting up his shelves at a more reasonable hour. The point had been made, and now it was done with. So why was he being forced to listen to— what even was this? Some sort of electro heavy-metal euro-pop? Was that a thing? And what sort of man went from Violin For Beginners Book 1 to _this_?

He marched downstairs and thumped on the door of the ground floor flat. The music, if you could call it that, stopped. Joe waited to see if Mr Downstairs would appear, but he did not. Totally not curious about his lunatic neighbour, Joe called out the most sarcastic ‘thank you’ he could muster through the door and went back upstairs.

* * *

“Would it be bad to set something on fire?” Nicky mused. Nile lowered the sandwich she was about to bite into with a long-suffering sigh.

“Depends what it is. If it’s a pile of logs in a fireplace, then no. If it’s your neighbour’s flat, then yes.”

“Hmm. I was thinking more about the smell. Like if there was a fire in the garden. A controlled fire, obviously.”

“Obviously.” Nile rolled her eyes. “Don’t you think you’re getting a bit weird about this?” She took a bite of her sandwich and chewed defiantly, as if he’d been stopping her.

“There was more drilling, Nile. And hammering. Drilling and hammering.”

“Wasn’t the drilling and hammering in the middle of the afternoon this time? Seems like a reasonable time to be drilling and hammering.”

“He doesn’t need to be drilling and hammering at all.”

“You don’t know that. Maybe he’s remodelling the flat. Maybe he’s a carpenter.”

“He is not a carpenter.”

“How do you know? Have you ever even spoken to him?”

He hadn’t. He hadn’t even seen him. They must be on completely different schedules because they hadn’t so much as passed each other in the hall. He had heard him speaking on the phone, once, on the day he moved in. He had thought at the time that he had a nice voice. That was before the stomping began. He hadn’t heard him speak since, unless you counted whatever he’d shouted through the door that time. He had moved in six months ago after Mrs Cobb had moved out — Mrs Cobb who had been so quiet that Nicky had felt compelled to check on her if he hadn’t seen her for a few days just to make sure she was still alive — and the only proof of his existence was the extra rubbish in the wheelie bin, the clothes that periodically appeared on the clothesline in the shared back garden, and the noise that emanated from his flat.

Nile smiled smugly at his silence. “See. He could be a carpenter.”

“He’s not a carpenter.”

* * *

He was so absorbed in his work that it took a while for Joe to notice the smell. Smoke. Something was burning. The smoke alarm hadn’t gone off though, so presumably it wasn’t something in the building.

It took no time at all to trace the smell to the open window. He pushed it open further and stuck his head out.

The smoke billowed from a large metal drum on what the landlord had the nerve to call a lawn. Fortunately, the wind was blowing it away from the house. Less fortunately, the wind was blowing it straight into his clothes that were drying on the line. “Asshole!” Joe yelled, then realised he couldn’t actually see said asshole anywhere. Surely he hadn’t left the fire unattended. He leaned further out of his window, looked down, and got his first glimpse of his neighbour: mid-brown hair and broad shoulders. That was it. How disappointing. Though Joe didn’t know what he had been expecting. A twirling mustache and a cape, perhaps? He considered going down to rescue his clothes and give Mr Downstairs a piece of his mind while he was at it, but decided he didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. He was going to have to wash his clothes again no matter what, so he may as well leave them down there for now. He settled for yelling, “I’m reporting you to the council, you dick,” and slamming the window as hard as he could.

He did actually spend some time on the council website to see if he could report him for anything, but the website seemed to be designed specifically to discourage people from using it at all. He had a vague idea that he would need to report him to the landlord before he could report him to the council, and the landlord was a bit weird. Joe avoided speaking to him as much as he could. Plus, it seemed unlikely that the drilling wouldn’t be brought up.

Mr Downstairs was definitely getting a new name though. After some consideration, he settled on That Prick.

* * *

Nicky didn’t receive any missives from the council or from the landlord, so presumably Him Upstairs hadn’t gone through with his threat. There also hadn’t been any drilling for a while. Perhaps it was over.

The front door slammed and Nicky jumped. He glanced out of the window and caught a glimpse of Him Upstairs as he walked down the path. Dark curly hair and the confident gait of someone who thought he was entitled to drill holes in the walls at dawn. Nicky had always found confidence appealing, but it was good to know there were exceptions to every rule.

It took a while for him to notice the new noise. It crept into his perception gradually and then lodged there, unmoving, for hours. He had to hand it to Him Upstairs. There were laws, not to mention clauses in the lease, about loud and persistent noise. There were no laws, or clauses in the lease, about quiet noises that exist _right on the edge_ of your awareness with no discernible source.

It was a sort of hissing noise, like air escaping from a valve. But nothing in Nicky’s flat had anything escaping from anywhere. Nicky knew, because Nicky had checked. And then checked again. It had to be coming from upstairs.

He was fairly certain Him Upstairs hadn’t come back yet, but he went and knocked on his door just in case. Knocking on the door usually resulted in the noise stopping, but this time it did not. It carried on. And on. And on. By the time he went to bed Nicky, a man who had literally sworn an oath to do no harm, was feeling murderous.

The noise was still going in the morning, when Nicky slept through his alarm after a restless night’s sleep. He threw on some clothes, brushed his teeth and ran out of the door. He didn’t even have time for coffee. He took the time, though, to scribble a quick note to his neighbour and leave it on the stairs where he could see it.

* * *

“I’m putting an end to it,” Joe said, holding his phone between his shoulder and his jaw while he dug out his keys. “I will be the bigger person here.”

“Sure you will,” Booker said, barely discernible over the sound of his kids playing in the background.

“I will,” Joe insisted. He finally found his keys and got the door open.

“Until the next time he does something that annoys you.”

“No, that’s—” There was a note on the stairs. Frowning, Joe picked it up.

“That’s what?”

“The fucking prick.” Booker laughed, loud and delighted. “He’s left me a note. Listen to this. ‘Whatever’s making that noise can you please make it stop?’”

“Sounds polite enough to me.”

“Then there’s something underneath it in Italian. I only recognise some of the words, but none of them are very polite.”

“Ah, taking the moral high ground in English then being a petty bastard in your own language. A sound tactic provided your opponent doesn’t speak your language.” Joe fished around in his overnight bag for the pen he knew he had in there. “What are you doing?”

“Writing him a note of his own.” He wrote ‘NO’ across the note in thick black letters and pushed it under the door of the downstairs flat.

“What happened to being the bigger person?”

“Oh, shut up.”

“Well,” Booker sighed, “edifying as this has been, I have to go and have a much more mature conversation with my four year old. Try not to do anything illegal.”

“I’ll do my best.”

Joe stomped up the stairs to his flat. He had been in such a good mood and then the second he stepped through the door it all went to shit. He needed to seriously reconsider his housing options.

He put his key in the lock and then stopped. There _was_ a noise coming from inside the flat. A sort of hissing or gushing, like… like…

Oh, fuck.

He wrenched open the door and headed straight for the bathroom where the dodgy tap was. He was splashing through puddles before he even reached the bathroom door, which he shouldered open praying he wasn’t going to see what he thought he was going to see.

Water fountained out of the tap practically to the ceiling before pouring into what appeared to be a small lake on the bathroom floor.

“Shit.”

Because he was an artist and not a plumber he acted on his instinct to stop the water by the most immediate means and pressed his hand down on the top of the tap. This achieved nothing except spraying water all over him and he stepped back, spluttering and blinking water out of his eyes.

Stop tap. There was a stop tap under the kitchen sink.

He ran to the kitchen and reached under the sink. The tap slipped under his wet fingers but it turned easily enough. Nothing happened. He could still hear the water running in the bathroom. Damn. Did this one only shut off the kitchen sink? Was there another one?

He splashed back to the bathroom and felt around under the sink. No stop tap.

There was one outside, he remembered. One that shut off the water for the whole house. He ran downstairs and round the back and sure enough, hidden behind some truly spectacular weeds, was the stop tap. This one was a lot stiffer than the one upstairs and he struggled to turn it. But it moved a little and then a little more and he kept going until it wouldn’t go any further. Then he went back inside, slipping in the tiled hallway as he dripped water everywhere, and checked that it had actually worked.

It had. The fountain was a mere trickle now and as he watched it stopped completely. He sagged against the doorframe for a moment, then pulled out his phone and went to call the landlord.

* * *

Nicky skidded on the wet floor as he opened the front door. Why were there puddles everywhere? What the hell had Him Upstairs been doing? Too tired to care much beyond muttering about people being inconsiderate, he went into his flat to find his own note from that morning with a large ‘NO’ scribbled across it, which was just the icing on the crappy cake that had been his day so far. True, the wording of his note had been, well. Not ideal. But only if Him Upstairs could read Italian.

It was then he noticed that noise had, in fact, stopped. This was almost immediately followed by him noticing there was something weird about the kitchen floor. It was covered in water, he realised as he got closer. And the ceiling…

He was up the stairs before he’d even really thought about it, hammering on the upstairs flat’s door. He wasn’t one to raise his voice normally, but this was not normal. Nothing about the last few weeks had been normal. “What the hell have you been doing?” he yelled. “Why is there water everywhere? Why is my _fucking kitchen ceiling_ falling in? Why—”

The door flew open and Nicky was cut off mid-rant.

Oh.

Oh no.

Oh, this was _terrible_.

Him Upstairs was the most gorgeous man Nicky had ever seen in his life.

He was also soaking wet, and absolutely furious.

“What am I doing?” he spat. “What am I doing? Oh, nothing much. Just some redecorating. I thought a flood-based theme might create a nice ambiance. My bathroom fucking flooded, you moron, which you knew and did absolutely nothing about. Unless you count that passive-aggressive little note of yours as doing something about it. Which, for the record, I do not.”

Nicky gaped for a second before finding his voice. “Me? You’re blaming this on me?”

“You heard it. You left me a note about it. It must have been going for hours, at least, and at no point did you think to yourself, ‘hey, maybe I should call the landlord about that weird noise from upstairs’.”

“Oh. Forgive me for not psychically realising you are so completely inept at being an adult that you would go away for two days and leave your bathroom tap running the entire time.”

“I didn’t leave it running, it broke.”

“Really? It broke all by itself?”

“Fuck you.”

I would love you to, Nicky thought and it was only a lifetime of self-discipline that kept the words in. He wasn’t in the habit of sleeping with assholes, no matter how much their eyes burned or their wet t-shirts clung to their chests. “Call the landlord. Get this fixed.” He turned and stalked back downstairs. His neighbour apparently wasn’t done and his voice followed him down.

“Oh, call the landlord. Why didn’t I think of that? So glad I have an adult like you around to point out the completely fucking obvious. What would I do without you?”

Nicky slammed the door as hard as he could behind him.

* * *

God was testing him, Joe decided. It was the only explanation. His neighbour had been difficult enough when he was an unseen irritant, now he was much worse. So much worse. For a start, Joe had renamed him again from That Prick to Hot Neighbour. He hadn’t intended to, it just sort of happened. His brain had done it without any input from him at all. Joe was big enough to admit that if he’d known his neighbour looked like that he wouldn’t have done the drilling. Or, he might, but he would definitely have answered the door when he came to complain.

Things were eerily quiet from downstairs and had been since the flooding incident. This would be fine except they kept running into each other now. He had seen more of Hot Neighbour in the last three days than he had in the whole of the time he had lived here. He was some sort of health worker, judging by the NHS lanyard he wore, which explained why they hadn’t bumped into each other before; he wasn’t exactly working a nine to five and neither was Joe. But it didn’t explain why they kept bumping into each other _now_. In the hallway, at the bus stop, at the self-service checkout at Tesco. That morning they had literally collided at the front door, Joe going out and Hot Neighbour coming in. Hot Neighbour had started to apologise, presumably on some sort of polite reflex Joe would never have suspected he could possess, then stopped and glared at him instead.

Joe really wished that look didn’t do the things to him that it did.

It wasn’t that he was into being glared at disdainfully, quite the opposite. It was just that being the object of that man’s attention was, well. It was an experience.

It was just a shame he was _such_ a prick.

* * *

Nicky tended to think he was the forgiving type. God knew he’d screwed up enough in his own life that he wasn’t in a position to deny absolution to anyone else. But he didn’t think he could get over this. Him Upstairs was rude, self-centred, thoughtless, inconsiderate, and he’d made Nicky jerk off to him in the shower four times in as many days. It was truly unforgivable.

Nicky had been much happier when his neighbour had just been annoying, before he knew he had such beautiful dark eyes, before he’d known he had a mouth that was made for blowjobs and kisses, before he knew what he looked like with water dripping from his curls and running down his neck.

He was probably really selfish in bed.

Probably.

* * *

“I’m getting it sorted,” the landlord said, infuriatingly indifferent. “it’s just going to take some time.”

“And what am I supposed to do in the meantime?” Joe snapped. “My bathroom has no floor.”

“You should have thought of that before you flooded my house.” The line went dead. Joe stared at his phone in disbelief then hurled it at the sofa. It bounced off and disappeared under the coffee table.

Everything in his flat was still damp. Everything. Even things the water hadn’t touched were still, somehow, damp. It had been a week since the flood and he had heaters everywhere and it was still fucking damp. The floor had been taken up in the bathroom, and near the sink there was a hole through which he could see right into the kitchen downstairs. He avoided looking at it, for a variety of reasons.

He retrieved his phone from under the table, pulled up Spotify, and began searching for the loudest thing he could find. This was definitely a totally normal reaction to a bad week and had nothing to do with wanting to see the way his neighbour’s eyes blazed.

The knock at the door took far longer than Joe would have liked. He turned the music off and wrenched the door open so hard it bounced off the wall. Fortunately he managed to stop it with his foot before it hit him in the face, but it threw him off enough that he gave Hot Neighbour the chance to get his own rant in first. He stepped across the threshold, right into Joe’s personal space.

“What the hell is wrong with you? Why are you doing this? Do you enjoy making people miserable? I guess it wasn’t enough for you already, with the drilling and the hammering and _hole in my goddamn ceiling_. Of all the selfish assholes I have met in my life you have got to be the—”

“Shut up.”

“Excuse me?”

“I said, shut up.”

Joe wasn’t a vain man, but he owned a mirror and knew what he looked like. He knew when men were interested in him. Hot Neighbour was interested in him. He’d seen it all week. It was in the way those eyes kept falling to his lips, the way he angled his body towards him. The way his breath quickened when Joe leaned a little closer.

Or maybe he was just gearing himself up to punch Joe in the mouth. Either was possible.

The moment stretched out. “I can’t tell if you want to kiss me or hit me,” Joe said.

With a growl that shot right down Joe’s spine, Hot Neighbour grabbed the front of Joe’s shirt and kissed him. His tongue swept into Joe’s mouth with no preamble at all and Joe’s back hit the wall hard enough to knock the air out of him. Joe gave as good as he got, biting and sucking and earning himself the most delicious moan as his fingers sank into the other man’s hair and pulled.

“Just so we’re clear,” Hot Neighbour said between kisses. “I do also want to hit you.” His mouth moved down to Joe’s neck while his fingers deftly worked at the buttons on his shirt.

“The feeling’s mutual,” Joe hissed as teeth scraped his neck. “Fuck.”

Joe hadn’t expected his day to end with him coming in his pants while dry-humping his annoying neighbour, but there was a very real danger of that happening. He had never been devoured quite so thoroughly quite so quickly. There was a hot mouth on his neck, eager fingers roaming across his chest and stomach, and a strong thigh pressed firmly between his legs. Joe ground down harder and lights flashed before his eyes.

“You may be an asshole, but you’re good with your mouth,” Joe gasped as they fumbled with each other’s belts.

“Shut up.”

“Make me— oh, fuck.”

They came panting into each other’s mouths, their hands around each other’s cocks. For all the push and pull, there was something tender about the gentle hand that cupped the back of Joe’s head right at the end. The final kiss after they sank slowly to the floor was light and delicate, and Joe felt something in his chest soften and melt and spread slowly outward. Trouble, Joe knew. He pulled back to find sea-green eyes looking at him, intense and bright.

“That was…”

“Yeah,” Joe said.

“Better than I thought it was going to be.”

“Hey!” Joe swatted half-heartedly at his arm. “You really are an asshole.” There was no heat in it, and he got a chuckle in response.

They needed to get cleaned up, but Joe didn’t want to move even though they were sitting on his still slightly damp hallway carpet. He could just about reach his jacket from here if he stretched and he managed to retrieve a packet of tissues from the pocket. They got themselves cleaned and zipped up, and then the awkward silence descended. But only briefly.

“Did you play that terrible music just to get me to come up here?”

“No,” Joe lied. Hot Neighbour raised a sceptical eyebrow in response. “Fine, yes.” Another chuckle. Joe found he liked it better than the yelling, wanted to hear more of it. “Sorry about the hole in your ceiling.”

“Sorry I didn’t call the landlord about the strange noise.”

“We could be here all night with this. The drilling was probably a bit much. And the hammering.”

“The fire in the garden.”

“That was crazy.”

“I had it under control.”

“And the violin?”

“Violin?” For the first time in this conversation Hot Neighbour didn’t look sheepish, just confused. “What— oh. The violin. That wasn’t me, that was my niece.”

“What?” Joe said, suddenly uneasy and not sure why.

“She came to stay with me for a few days while my sister was in hospital. She was so worried about her mother that I suppose I indulged her more than I should, let her do what she liked.”

“Oh.”

“I shouldn’t have done, especially late at night. I apologise.”

“No, no. You were focused on your family, I get it.”

“I suppose,” Hot Neighbour went on thoughtfully, as though he were thinking out loud, “subconsciously I might have also been letting her do it because I was annoyed about the stomping. Sorry.”

“Stomping?”

“I know you weren’t really stomping around you were just walking normally, but it sounded like it in the early hours of the morning. After a particularly rough night-shift I’d be convinced you were doing it on purpose.” Joe was absolutely baffled as to what on earth he could be talking about. Then he got it. “What are you doing up and about at the crack of dawn, anyway?”

“Praying,” Joe said as deadpan as he could, though he desperately wanted to laugh. Hot Neighbour’s eyes widened.

“Oh. Ah.”

Joe did laugh at that, and after staring at him for a moment Hot Neighbour joined in. “Are you telling me that all this started because I was annoyed about you taking care of your niece and you were annoyed about me _praying_?”

“Apparently so.” His face looked so different when he smiled, warm and open. Joe had no choice but to lean in and kiss him. It was lovely: soft and deep and unhurried. Oh, Joe was definitely in trouble.

Something occurred to Joe as they broke apart, something he really needed to rectify. “I’m Joe, by the way.”

“Joe. I like that better than Him Upstairs.”

“Is that what you’ve been calling me?” Joe laughed. “I don’t want to tell you what I’ve been calling you.”

“Then I won’t ask. I’m Nicky.”

Joe stuck his hand out, and got another of those delightful laughs as Nicky shook it. “Pleasure to meet you, Nicky.”

“The pleasure’s all mine,” Nicky said, and pulled him in for another kiss.

**Author's Note:**

> Note to self: Never again try to write a sex scene where the participants don't know each other's names and your POV character has given the other person a stupid nickname. Good god.
> 
> I'm still working on my wip, I swear.


End file.
